A note on the semantic and morphological properties of proper names in the Prolex project

In this paper we present a linguistic approach to the analysis of proper names. The basic assumption of our approach is that proper names are linguistic units of text that should be treated using the same methods that are applied to text in its totality. We illustrate the inflectional and derivational properties of simple and multi-word proper names on the example of Serbian, and describe how these properties have been formalized in order to develop e-dictionaries of the DELA type. In order to support multi-lingual applications we have developed a model of a multilingual relational dictionary of proper names based on an ontology, as well as an actual database. Finally, we outline how the developed dictionaries and database can be used in real monolingual and multi-lingual applications, such as information extraction.